Peru Week 1 - Part 3: No Bones About It…

One of the other benefits to the school is Emily, the On-staff event coordinator. She puts together excursions for students six days a week ranging in price from free to 85 soles (about 25 dollars).

 

Thursday I went on a tour of the San Francisco church (cost: five Soles) in center of Lima. The church is from the late 1600's and had old Catacombs underneath it. This tour was defiantly an experience.

 

I suspect from time to time I have found myself on top of this blindfolded high-horse where I consider myself open minded and worldly. Then, I go and do something like this little tour and get knocked off my high horse of worldliness and back to the ground of ignorant American-ness. Let me explain, I thought the catacombs would be a progression of underground tunnels, what I did not think is that I would be looking at around 25,000 human bodies that were tossed to rot in the basement of this church from the late 1600's to the early 1900's.

 

Let me clarify that the people were no longer rotting, rather in the mid 1960's they made the place a museum and cleaned all the bones and organized them all nice-like into petty designs in wells and holes. What this means to me is that these peoples bodies not only did not have a final resting place but they were scraped, cleaned, sorted and shaped for a shit ton of silly tourists, such as myself, to swing by and have a good look at. Meanwhile the tour guide rushes us to the next pile of bones so he can get through the whole tour and on to his next group of silly tourists. Did I mention that the pieces of bone that had broken or were not pretty had been tossed in a hand full of out of the way cubby holes?

 

I couldn't get through it fast enough and was bothered to say the least. Someone afterwards asked me what I was expecting to see and I felt like a babbling idiot saying, "Well, well I don't know, I didn't think that, I mean that would never happen in the U.S., families would be fighting over bodies to get bones back, and they just wouldn't do that… they, they, we, they, we, well I never, well,"  

 

In hindsight, I wanted to kick my own ass for not knowing better, for being so shocked, for being so ignorant and American. Yet still I find myself a bit out-of-sorts about it. I will use the F-bomb again. What the fuck was that that I saw?

 

Note to self: You don't do well with human remains just lying around. Try to check future school activities to avoid dead people as municipal art projects.